Per Tim Ferriss and one of his 5-Bullet Fridays, I went through How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You. It was interesting. I started some of this on my own, after listening to some other productivity books Cal Newport Deep Work and James Clear Atomic Habits (Inversion of 1st Law: Make it invisible). In fact, I may have exceeded the article, in that I removed some troublesome apps, like all social media and personal e-mail from my phone. (I get a stipend to have work e-mail on my mobile device, so I installed it, but I have it buried and rarely choose to use it).
One thing I liked was the making less useful things less visible by foldering and paging the folders (if not simply removing them). Removing most notifications and badging should also reduce the amount of stress I feel when I look and see the “stuff I haven’t handled” piling up.
I am playing around with a couple of the suggested apps and settings re: notifications to see if I like it. Using the Do Not Disturb setting as a white-list is particularly exciting as I get multiple spam calls and texts per day. In my case, it is good that I already changed jobs, as that method of call screening would be tedious to maintain in the process of interviewing and coordinating meetings with lots of new people.
I intend to go through the same process on on the iPad. I plan to dedicate the iPad to personal betterment (training, and reading) with a touch of leisure (other reading, personal e-mail and web surfing).